‘People described a smell of rotten apples but I knew it was a chemical gas’

There were very few trained medics able to treat gas victims after the Balisan valley attacks in 1987. DOCTOR ZYRIAN ABDUL YOUNIS was the only peshmerga doctor in a region stretching from Erbil to Iran.

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On 16 April 1987, DOCTOR ‘ZYRIAN’ ABDUL YOUNIS, a medical officer with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), witnessed the chemical attack by planes on the Balisan valley. That night, hundreds of people who had been blinded by the chemicals and had massive blisters came to his medical station for help. Many of them died.

From a remote vantage point in the Zagros mountains of northeastern Iraq, Zyrian Abdul Younis watched as Iraqi helicopters and planes bombed the Balisan valley villages in an eerily quiet raid.

The attack on 17 April 1987 left behind clouds of dense white smoke that rolled down the mountain slopes, enveloping villages in their path.

‘The bombs were not like conventional munitions,’ says Zyrian, a senior doctor with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). ‘There were no loud explosions.’

These chemical bombs were not like conventional munitions – there were no loud explosions

Doctor Zyrian was the only doctor in a region stretching from the Iranian border to Erbil, the Kurdish capital, 80 km southwest of Balisan.His small field hospital tended wounded peshmerga from all the Kurdish political parties as well as local villagers.

The fact that the Iraqis were using poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War was well known to the Kurds, but this was one of the first times it had been deployed against civilians and this came as a shock to Doctor Zyrian.

DOCTOR ‘ZYRIAN’ ABDUL YOUNIS, a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) medical officer, assisted hundreds of injured who needed help after the chemical bombing of the Balisan valley in 1987. With a small group of paramedics, he evaded Iraqi Army “death squads”, who captured and executed any males who might have witnessed of the attacks.

‘We smelled some very strange smells. Some people described it as the smell of rotten apples. Some said, “No, it’s like garlic,”’ he says. ‘I instantly knew it was a chemical gas.’

Though the attack on Balisan Valley was the first occasion that the Iraqi government had gassed its own population, it was not the last.During the Anfal in 1988 such attacks occurred regularly. The Kurds with no training and limited medical supplies were simply ill-equipped to deal with the medical and military consequences of poison gas.

It was a crime against humanity

Doctor Zyrian estimated that 203 people died in the gas attacks on Sheikh Wasan and Balisan villages in 1987. The Iraqi regime regarded this as a highly successful venture. They had carried out an attack in violation of international law and it had gone unnoticed by the outside world.

‘Nobody cared about it. Nobody even knew about it. It was a crime against humanity,’ says Doctor Zyrian.

DOCTOR ‘ZYRIAN’ ABDUL YOUNIS witnessed the chemical bombardment of the Balisan valley in April 1987 when he was a medical officer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). He reflects on how the West ignored these attacks, and thus allowed Saddam to continue with his genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds.

Balisan Valley

In 1988 the Balisan Valley was a well know peshmerga stronghold. The Iraqi government attacked the area in April of that year, employing a range of poison gases that killed hundreds.